Outside Uncle Sam
My uncle Sam died yesterday, just twelve days short of his sixty-ninth birthday. While it’s usually said of people who pass at his age that he had a full life, Sam pretty much missed out on every stage of life that comes after puberty, and seemed to live less than anyone I’ve ever known. But he taught me as much as my mother about the world and how to live in it, and to always give better than you got.
My mother raised me alone while starting a teaching career, so I spent a lot of time with Sam. To even a small child, Sam was clearly not a normal adult, but in almost every way that would matter to a child, he was better. He would take you to Jack In The Box and let you go swimming right after, he watched cool stuff on TV, and never told you to go to bed. Even if you were standing on his shoulders, playing his head like a bongo, he never, ever lost his temper.
Gentle almost to absence, he spoke like a cheap man sending a telegram, as if someone was charging him by the word, until he thought you were safe, and then he never shut up. He had an encyclopedic mind for trivia and a wry, dry sense of humor. He was never heard to laugh out loud, but he loved a good joke, and to make him smile was a memorable achievement. Only then could you get a sense of how much this evasive sphinx craved and treasured human contact, if only on his own terms.
Because Sam seldom left the house, family, television, machines and books were his universe. A hulking, painfully shy man who drove a scary primer-white van in the 70’s, he checked nearly every box on the serial killer personality survey (and bore an uncanny resemblance to infamous oedipal spree killer Ed Kemper), but was a gentle giant who never hurt a fly and toiled tirelessly to care for bees. He kept an observation hive in his kitchen for their honey and disassembled automobile engines on his coffee table. He knew everything about every character actor on every show that would come on the TV, all their past works and scandalous secrets.
He was an effortless mechanic with a passion for motorcycles and a genius for improvised repairs. If it was broken, Sam could fix it. Averse to human contact and utterly terrified of women, he sought safe harbors where he could hide and attain mastery. He watched Jeopardy religiously and knew every answer that didn’t involve popular culture after 1990. We used to joke that he would be theJeopardyGOAT, if only we could get him to compete without realizing he was on the show.
A compulsive collector, Sam would bring over odd toys, comix or curios he encountered while haunting thrift stores and swap meets. I remember him handing me a portable transistor radio he’d found at Goodwill, that transformed in his hands into a submachine gun with the flick of a hidden switch. He gave me a Creature From The Black Lagoonstatuette he picked up somewhere that became my totem, the center of the shrine of my childhood, and later, a tattered paperback copy of Hodgson’s Boats Of The Glen Carrig. Together, we watched Saturday Night Live, Twilight Zone,Disasterpiece Theater, Barney Miller, Rockford Files. Without thinking about it, Uncle Sam curated my whole aesthetic.
Only much later did I learn how the tragically happy accident of Sam came to be. Long before autism or Aspergers were common diagnoses, Sam showed signs of being different — emotionally withdrawn, consumed with objects and utterly at sea with people. He was not quite ten when his parents divorced; my grandmother’s second husband relentlessly terrorized him until he began wetting the bed, whereupon the stepfather forced Sam to wear his wet underpants to school. Around the same time, my great aunt’s husband molested him during a couple sleepovers. He was petrified and told only my mother about it, but they were afraid to tell anyone else. Sam’s emotional clock was smashed by trauma and stuck in the last innocent blush before puberty.
Sam worked in his father’s sandwich shop as a delivery driver until it was bulldozed to make way for condos, and later helped out at the True Value hardware store my grandmother’s third husband owned. Some summer nights, we’d get lawn chairs and Cokes from the soda machine and watch the movies playing at the neighboring Campus Drive-In from the roof of the sawmill.
Later, he struck out on his own, in his uniquely weird fashion, living in a trailer and prospecting for gold in Wildcat Canyon. If he ever found any, he never told us about it. As long as you didn’t make too much noise while he was listening to Paul Harvey, you were free to ride his jury-rigged dirtbikes or ogle antique nudie magazines where the models’ genitalia was airbrushed out, which was far more disturbing than the unconcealed real thing.
He drove trucks for my great uncle’s freight line in Long Beach for a while, and seemed happiest, then. His lonely nature was elevated by this heavily negotiated foray into the world. He had adventures, stories and long, peaceful interludes of safe solitude on the road. When that family business was also dissolved, he parked his truck at my parents’ house, unable to let it go, but equally unable to face asking someone who wasn’t family for a job.
He was like a ghost that haunted our family, always showing up last to clean up leftovers at every holiday gathering. Whenever something broke or somebody needed a ride somewhere, Sam never said no. All of us used Sam while kidding him about his weight, his shyness, his hoarding, and like the Giving Tree, he always gave what he had.
When my first marriage ended in 2006, I moved in with Sam in his house in Del Cerro, the sleek upper-middle class suburb where my grandparents had lived. The sprawling four-bedroom suburban house quickly became the eyesore of the neighborhood as filled in with Sam’s derelict cars and debatable treasures, and in his loneliness, Sam had moved from collecting broken things and trash to collecting broken people. I didn’t complain at the time, because I was one of them.
While Sam had migrated from Paul Harvey to Rush Limbaugh and huffed reactionary political bullshit like unfiltered cigarettes, he surrounded himself with the people his radio mentors warned him against — Ricardo the radical Chilean Socialist, the Pacific Beach Hare Krishnas, the scary beardo dressed all in white who periodically squatted in our backyard. He clung with childish tenacity to racist opinions like a wet electric blanket that alternated cold comfort for shocks of irrational fear, but they somehow never stopped him from offering help or friendship to anyone who could handle his weirdness. In his own weird Sam way, he evolved beyond his prejudices and became a true humanitarian.
It also wasn’t until his last years that he ever had anything like a romantic relationship that we knew of, albeit with a dipsomaniac former softcore porn star and mud wrestler who drank three meals a day and was looking for a place to die and someone to look after her chihuahua. We joked darkly about the odds that when, not if, she died in that house, Sam wouldn’t try to mummify her and add her to his collection. Whatever Donna’s issues, Sam cared deeply for her and took care of that chihuahua for the rest of its life.
I wrote a story about my time staying with Sam, “Inside Uncle Sid” (originally published as “Uncle Sid’s Collection” in Dead But Dreaming 2) that I glibly described as ninety percent true, but if everything I’ve said here seems like the obligatory preamble to a “We Never Knew…” confessional about the day we discovered Sam’s murder cellar, I had to invent the other shoe. Again, without meaning to, Sam taught me how easy it is to misjudge goodness that doesn’t constantly advertise itself.
If anyone could plausibly plead to a harsh childhood as a cause, if not an excuse, for awful deeds committed in adulthood, it would be Sam, and perhaps it’s only a question of when the traumas broke him that made him harmless, where similarly treated men have become monsters. The only time he ever physically attacked anyone was when he got into a shouting and shoving match with his domineering mother over the unsightly junk on his front yard, and took a swing at a cop for trying to haul it away.
Yes, Sam had issues, and he fought stubbornly against any attempt to force normal adult life upon him, down to his denial about his cancer; but I’ve never known a kinder, person who was more stoically cheerful in the face of challenges few could recover from. If he never broke out to live anything like a normal life, he didn’t pass on his anger to anyone else, and in his silent ability to withstand unendurable pain and pressure and always give better than he got, without meaning to, he taught me a little bit about how to live.
Sam died Saturday afternoon at my parents’ house, because the social worker declared his home uninhabitable. He spent his last night on her couch with his back to the TV, mouthing the correct questions to all the answers on Jeopardy. I tried to get down to San Diego from Portland to see him, but he was in too much pain, and resisting taking morphine, and in a moment between breaths, he simply let go.
There won’t be a formal memorial service, and his ashes will be scattered in Wildcat Canyon, as per his request. Almost nobody outside our family will remember Sam, and when we talk about him, we’ll recall the eccentric habits, the silly things he did, the sad, quiet clown that he was; but we should remember and share the great man that he could have been if not for the horrible things that were visited upon him, and the greatness of the good man that he never stopped being.